John Varley
John Varley grew up in Texas but now lives lives in Eugene, Oregon
with his wife and family. He won both the Hugo and Nebula awards for
his novella "The Persistence of Vision," and the Hugo for "The Pusher."
He has more Hugo and Nebula nominations than anyone but Robert Silverberg.

The first SF book John Varley ever read was Robert A. Heinlein's Red Planet. Red Thunder is his tribute
to that book, Rocket Ship Galileo, Have Spacesuit -- Will Travel, and all the other wonderful Heinlein juveniles that SF readers
of a certain age cut their teeth on.

Anyway, as you've probably figured out, a bunch of likeable Florida
teens get together and build a homemade spaceship, a couple decades from
now, with the help of a cashiered NASA astronaut and his idiot-savant
cousin, Jubal, who has discovered a simple vacuum-energy shunt. With free,
unlimited energy, just about anything can fly, even a spaceship made of
used railroad tank-cars...

OK, the framing plot doesn't bear close inspection, and the air kinda
leaks out of the tale once Red Thunder lifts off, but for 3/4 of the
book Red Thunder is GREAT, the Pure Quill, a delight to read. The kid's spaceship
would work, given the One Impossible Thing that makes this SF. The
other problems of spaceflight were solved long ago, and if you could fly
to Mars and back in a week, you wouldn't need sophisticated life support.
Watching the crew solve the practical problems of building a spaceship
in their garage -- actually a large, vacant warehouse -- and on a tight
budget (dollars & time -- see 1) makes for classic golden-age SF.

Once they get to Mars, the story turns perfunctory, as if Varley lost
interest. The Chinese and American astronauts are pure cardboard.
There's the obligatory Space Rescue, for high drama. There's an
oddly-anachronistic bit of Red-baiting, which I found distasteful. Then
the return home, to fame and riches. Eh.

Varley's too good a writer to leave the downside of Free Energy!
unexamined, and he tosses in a neat bit from Alfred
Bester's The Stars My Destination, but his solution to keeping the dirt-cheap megatons (PyrE)
away from the bad guys, while it might work, reads like a United Nations
press release. Better to have left that to our imagination, I think. In
fact, if I'd been Varley's stern editor, I'd have ended the novel when
Red Thunder lands on Mars, and summarized everything that happened later
in the Epilogue.

Still, there's more than enough Right Stuff here to make Red Thunder
worth reading, though long-time Varley fans may find the book a bit of a
letdown. Better, perhaps, to ignore the famous name, and enjoy the tale
for what it is, a fine, flawed, nostalgic remake of a childhood classic.

1
Varley uses time pressure for dramatic purposes, but here's
what he (and all the space pros) really think about the Space Race:

"Say Columbus took the Apollo route to the New World. He starts off with
three ships. Along about the Canary Islands he sinks the first ship,
just throws it away, deliberately. And it's his biggest ship. Come to
the Bahamas, he throws away the second ship. He reaches the New
World.... but his third ship can't land there. He lowers a lifeboat,
sinks the third ship, and rows ashore. He picks up a few rocks on the
beach, and rows right back out to sea, across the Atlantic.... and at
the Strait of Gibraltar he sinks the lifeboat and swims back to Spain
with an inner tube around his shoulders."